


Somewhere Nice

by iiintangible



Category: Deadpool (Movieverse), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, Feral Behavior, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-07 01:40:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15208055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiintangible/pseuds/iiintangible
Summary: Wade goes missing. Cable deals with it.





	1. i lost track of time

**Author's Note:**

> This is a pretty sad story. Normally I wouldn't warn for that, but I know some people get really disheartened by downer fics, and this is definitely a downer fic, so please tread carefully! Anyway, this is my first fic in a long time and first Cablepool fic at all, so please be kind. Comments and kudos keep me writing!
> 
> Also, special thanks and shout-out to [SenkoWakimarin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin), who complimented me so hard that I decided to post this abomination.

"He's gonna come back," Domino says. She pulls two beers out of Wade's fridge and closes the door with her hip. Even though the caps aren't twist offs, they pop off easy into her hand. She throws them on the countertop, where they clink against the laminate. She's wearing her hair pulled up and her shoulders are bare.

"I'm not worried," Cable says, sitting ramrod straight on Wade’s couch.

"Oh, for sure. That's why we're having this conversation. For no reason. Because you're not worried."

"I'm not."

She joins him in the living room. The edge of her yellow sun dress flutters when she sits down next to him. Wade made enough money to buy couches for the entire neighborhood, but had insisted on digging this one, squat, red and lumpy, out of the trash. It smells like cat hair and cigarette smoke, and the cushions exhale dust each time they’re touched.

Domino hands him one of the bottles. He holds it in his hand and rubs his thumb through the condensation gathered on the glass. He doesn't want it. He pretends to take a sip. The smell makes his stomach flip.

"You sure you even want him to come back?” Dom asks. She presses the rim of her bottle against her bottom lip. He feels her eyes on him like a leaden weight, dragging across his skin. “Having some peace and quiet around here has to be nice.”

He says nothing. Tips the beer against his mouth again. It’s cold enough to make his mouth ache. The wave of it crashes against and recedes from his clenched teeth.

"Far be it from me to tell you how you're feeling, but you're staring at the wall and you have been since I got here."

"That's exactly what you're doing. You're telling me how I feel." He can’t even pin down what he’s feeling himself. Like a moth, it flits away when he tries to reach to touch it. He can’t navigate the sense of disquiet and emptiness that he’s left with, and can’t find the words to tell Domino, though he’s sure she would understand.

"I know. You don’t start a conversation with emotional call-outs. I’m being polite. They don't have that in the future or something?"

"No. We stopped being polite after your generation deep-dicked the earth into an early grave."

"Oh, whatever. You don't even recycle." She waves a hand towards the garbage bin. It’s overflowing with cans and bottles and containers of rubbing alcohol. The blue recycling bin next to it is empty, save for an old newspaper soaked with bacon grease.

He shrugs.

“Corporations create more waste than individuals do. It's a drop in the bucket.”

“See, you're already making excuses like we do. You acclimated super fast.”

They sit in silence for a while.

She shifts next to him. Brings her feet up onto the couch, and presses her soles against his thigh. Her skin is warm even through the thick fabric of his fatigue bottoms.

“His guns are gone, right? His knives, his swords?”

“Yeah.”

Everything is gone. Even the gun cache from beneath the bathroom sink, and the tri-fold bag full of chef’s knives from the kitchen. Cable only has his own rifle and an M&P pistol left, and Wade would probably have taken them if he could have.

“Then he's fine,” Dom says. She leans forward and touches Cable’s forearm. Her fingertips are cool. “He'll come back. You just have to be patient."

It’s raining out again, in the middle of the day. The water plinks against the window, soft, in the hazy, glowing light of the sun.

“Yeah,” he says, even as doubt creeps its fingers into his chest and squeezes the blood from his heart. “You're right, Dom.”

“Of course I’m right.”

 

* * *

 

 

Wade is missing.

He left sometime in the morning, while Cable was gone from the apartment. He took the essentials - his weapons bag, his wallet, his costume, his cell phone. He left the rest of his clothing, his ugly stuffed unicorn, and his boxed DVD sets of both The Golden Girls and Frasier.

Cable searches high and low, but doesn’t find a note. He hadn’t expected one. He looks again, just to be sure. Nothing.

Wade hasn’t come back by the afternoon. Cable eats a bowl of cereal at the kitchen sink, and washes the bowl and spoon he’d used as soon as he’s finished. He looks through the bathroom cabinet for band-aids, finds a full box of them branded with a cartoon cat. Her little white face looks eerie, smiling at him from his index finger.

Soon, evening leaks through the windows, in the shadows of the surrounding apartment buildings and the gleam of passing headlights.

Cable texts Wade at 10:45. _Where the fuck are you?_ Wade doesn’t respond. He sends a second text that’s nothing but gun emojis to try to bait Wade into an argument. Twenty minutes pass. No response.

He tries to call. The ringer doesn’t ring, and he gets shunted straight to Wade’s shitty voicemail message.

“Yeah, hey, Wilson here,” Wade’s voice says, tinny over Cable’s cheap trac-phone speaker. “Hello? Hello? Haaaa! Just kidding, I’m not here. Can’t believe you fell for it. Anyway, leave a message.”

_Fine_ , Cable thinks, bitterly. He throws his phone against the wall hard enough to dent the plaster.

 

* * *

 

 

Cable hunts down and washes a sink full of dishes that are scattered throughout the apartment. It’s galling, since he’s never once seen Wade eat from a plate. He shoveled food into his mouth directly from packages, usually with his fingers, sometimes with plastic spoons, and he wouldn’t wipe up the crumbs until Cable threw a dishrag at his head and told him to grow the fuck up. He finds the mismatched bowls and plates hidden between the couch cushions and underneath the hallway rug. Wade must have done it just to piss him off. Had been waiting for the prank to be discovered so that he could laugh in Cable’s angry face. Cable stacks everything away in the cupboards, organized by size. Slams the doors when he’s finished.

He bleaches the shower. He bleaches the toilet and the kitchen sink. He sweeps the dust out from the corners of each room and uses Wade’s favorite t-shirt and a can of Lysol to clear out the dead bugs from the windowsills.

He throws out the cardboard box they had been using for a coffee table. It was stained with orange juice and sagged in the middle and couldn't hold anything heavier than the TV’s remote, but Wade had refused to let him throw it away. He hauls it to the curb with no small sense of satisfaction. It lasts until he came back into the apartment and finds it’s still empty, because Wade hadn’t appeared to yell at him over it.

He runs out of chores to do after three days.

He turns to home improvement after that. He watches Youtube videos to try to learn how to caulk the bathroom. The seam between the toilet and the tile flooring wasn't sealed properly. Every time anyone flushed the toilet, it squirted water. Wade had kept piling towels on top of the problem, even though it meant doing extra loads of laundry and buying new towels. He didn't want to call a plumber. Nate fixes it easily in one afternoon, after a bus ride to the hardware store and a stilted conversation with a young man in a red apron.

He buys a putty knife and a half pint of Fast ‘n Final, and a paintbrush and a can of eggshell paint. While salsa music from the bodega on the corner pours through the open window, he spackles over the hole he put in the wall with his phone.

His notifications had remained silent. Wade hadn’t texted or called. He had refused to show Cable any respect, to do the barest of kindnesses to him and let him know that he was alright.

A swell of desperate rage boils over, out of his chest, flooding his body with heat. He punches his fist through the wall. Then he spackles that, too.

With the wall repaired, the apartment is cleaner than it’s been since they moved in.

The tv’s still broken, though. He collapses on the couch and faces it, alone.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the week, with no sign of Wade, he relents and calls Weasel.

“No, he hasn't been here. Why would he be here?”

“What do you mean, why would he be there? He practically lives there,” Cable growls. Weasel has enough brains in his head to make a placating sort of sound.

“Settle down. Wade doesn’t come by as much anymore. Not since he shacked up with you. Thanks, by the way. I’ve been trying to get rid of him for years.”

“He didn't come by for a job?”

“Nah, I haven't seen him for at least a week and a half. Had to give all of his marks away.” He hears glass break, and Weasel swear. A crowd of voices cheers. “If you see him, don't tell him that. Last thing I need is him coming in here and bitching about jobs he's not even doing.”

“Right. Okay.”

“You sound worried. Why would you be worried about Wade?”

“I'm not.”

“Dude can't die. He's probably just sulking somewhere. He'll come back when he wants to. But you definitely won't seem him before then, for sure.”

“Right.”

“Well, thanks for calling. Don't call again. I hate talking to you, you make me nervous.”

The line goes dead. Cable hangs up.

 

* * *

 

_“Everything’s a joke to you, huh?”_

_“I was ready to die - I - listen to me - !”_

_“You don't listen. I'm so sick of you not hearing me.”_

_“I - I hear you -- “_

_“There was nothing. Get it through your thick skull - "_

 

* * *

 

He wakes up almost every morning from dreams about Wade.

They’re always fighting. Sometimes with bare knuckles, sometimes with guns, but usually with words. He can’t remember what they say to each other; like spiderwebs caught in match-fire, they burn out of his head as soon as he opens his eyes to the morning. What he does remember is Wade, screaming in Cable’s face, his eyes ringed red and spittle on his chin. Wade turning away from him, a figure cut from the churning shadows in the dark.

He starts sleeping in Wade's bedroom. His shoulders were always too wide for the couch, anyway. He thinks about washing the bedding and the pillows, which smell like Wade's unwashed skin. Instead, he sleeps on his side, his nose tucked into the sheets.

After he makes his morning coffee, he skims the neighborhood looking for Wade, but never finds him. He does it until he exhausts himself. Until he feels the ache of the techno-organic mesh pulsing through his muscle and bone and he has to stop. His coffee goes cold on the countertop. He takes naps in the afternoons and tries again.

“Don’t worry,” Dom says to him over the phone. Her voice always comes through his speaker clear, like a lamp held against the night. “He’ll come back. He will.”

He waits.

 

* * *

 

 

“He hasn’t been here, man,” Weasel says when Cable drops by Sister Margaret’s to ask for marks. Weasel’s hiding behind the bar, gripping a shotgun in his hands. He’s got a newly hired bouncer with a solid foot and a half on Cable, a shaved head and a thick gold ring shoved through his septum. He refuses to move from the door after Cable snarls at him to stay put. “You know I’d tell you if he had been just so I wouldn’t have to see your face. I see it enough in my nightmares.”

“I’m not here for Wade, fuckhead.”

They work out a deal. He takes the jobs Wade isn't doing. When he gets back to the bar, Cable always slams the assignments down on the counter just to watch Weasel jump.

Most of the jobs are easy enough to handle solo. So long as he doesn’t overexert himself, he can rely on his TK for shielding and to keep track of his gun. He still gets shot a few times, but the worst is just a graze on his left shoulder. It heals over with writhing metal and wire after a few hours on ice. The pain is dull. Easy to ignore.

Each mark he takes, he spares enough power to skim the surface of their minds, to see if they’ve seen Wade. None of them have.

He makes enough money to replace Wade’s shitty couch in just one day. He stands in front of a display in a department store for two hours before he decides against it. When he gets back to the apartment, he takes a nap in the living room, his right arm hanging off the couch’s edge, the back of his head pillowed against an ash and cat hair-covered cushion.

 

* * *

 

 

Wade’s been gone for two months.

“The impressive part is that he tricked you into paying his rent for this long,” Dom says. She's wearing a pale green sweater beneath her leather jacket. A cold snap had hit early in the season. Cable had had to buy a winter coat and scarf large enough to keep his neck covered when he went out.

Dom looks worried now, too. She doesn’t tell Cable that Wade will be back as often as she used to.

She picks through what little is in Wade’s refrigerator. There’s no beer left, because Cable had refused to buy more after she had cleaned it out. She ends up holding a glass of lukewarm tap water, but she doesn’t drink it.

“Maybe we should look for him.”

I’ve tried, Cable thinks. I’ve looked through every mind I could reach, I’ve tracked down old neighbors, I’ve found old friends. I convinced his high school sweetheart to meet me and I went to Ontario to do it. I asked Xavier, even though I knew it was useless, because trying to read Wade’s mind was like trying to drag your fingers through a tar pit, like sinking your teeth into rotten fruit.

“Don’t know if it’d do any good,” he says instead, and watches snow fall in fat little clumps past the window.

 

* * *

 

 

Three and a half months after Wade goes missing, Cable wakes up in the middle of the night.

He sits upright in Wade’s bed, sheets tangled at his waist and soaked with sweat. He doesn't remember dreaming, or going to sleep. The red glow from Wade’s alarm clock tells him that it’s 3:12 AM, and that the temperature outside is 54 degrees. He knuckles the sleep from his eyes.

There’s a crash. There’s someone in the apartment. He can feel them, though when he tries to delve deeper into their mind his touch sloughs off like oil on ice.

He rips the sheet away, on his feet in an instant. He pulls his M&P from under the pillow and loads it with loose bullets from the bedside table. The man he is falls away, replaced by the soldier, an extension of the gun held tight in the grip of his hand.

Cable puts his back to the bedroom door. Waits. Time slides by, and he focuses on the beating of his heart, solid and steady in his ears. The silence is oppressive. Same as it’s been for the past three and a half months.

Nothing moves. Nothing breaks.

He peers around the door, past the door frame. The apartment is dark. There’s no moonlight or starlight, just the glow of street lamps and the endless stream New York traffic. Then, in a passing headlight, he sees it, the jagged reflection of yellow painted on the glass. One of the windows is broken.

He steps into the living room, gun held at the ready.

There. Crouched in the square cut of shadow blanketing the living room, a man, surrounded by shards of glass and the wet slush of melting snow. He’s on hands and knees, his face pressed against the carpet. The top of his head is covered in red wounds and contusions that shift and weep.

“Holy shit. Wade?”

Something inside Cable’s chest constricts, and it's hard to breathe, like the oxygen’s been burned out of the air. He drops the gun. It lands with a thud at his feet. He crosses the floor so quickly to get to Wade’s side that he trips, goes down hard on one knee and has to scramble to avoid falling on his face. He cuts his foot on glass. Ignores it, and ignores the smear of his blood that he leaves behind on the floor.

Wade's wearing his costume. It’s filthy, the red spotted with patches of brown, and there are deep gashes torn across the back. His mask is gone. His feet are bare. He’s covered in dried blood that flakes off his skin, and he stinks, like rot and pus and wet dog.

“Wade, what happened?” he asks. His lungs ache. His mind is circling itself, like water circling a drain. He can't think. He wants so badly to take Wade up and shake him and just start screaming. Months and months and months. You were gone and you didn't say anything. Where were you? _Wade, where were you?_

“Wade?”

Wade doesn’t respond. Cable kneels next to him, and touches his flesh fingers to Wade's face. His skin feels fever-hot, and wet. He shoves his fingers beneath Wade's chin, to angle Wade's head up and get a better look at him. There’s a shard of glass sticking out of his cheek. He hadn't removed it. Had probably ground it further into himself by rubbing his face against the floor. The wound is inflamed and leaking. Cable pulls it free from the sucking pull of Wade's knitting skin. He can see a flash of white bone before the damage heals.

Wade doesn't react. He doesn’t look at Cable. He doesn’t look at anything. His eyes are unfocused and blank and rimmed red.

Horror drops into Cable’s stomach and limbs with the weight of a truck.

“Wade?”


	2. i will learn without you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your supportive words, comments, and kudos. I hope that this chapter is up to snuff.

**then**   ****  
  
This century had a sickness. It was easy now, living it, to understand it as the progenitor of his own time. Personhood here was dictated by what kind of papers you had in your pockets. ID, checkbook, driver’s license, birth certificate. Whatever the fuck a social security card was. Cable had nothing. Was then, by extension, nothing. He learned that lesson quick.  
  
Trouble started when his stolen credit card stopped working. He’d been able to buy three bags of beef jerky and a bottle of orange juice from a corner store without any problem. When he’d gone back for a pack of spearmint gum, though, the kid behind the counter had asked to hold the card. He was young, pimply; his wide eyes roved over Cable’s face. Sweat pricked on his upper lip. He had his finger on a button hidden behind a cardboard display selling Marlboro cigarettes, and he was praying Cable was unarmed to Saint Maria in his head. Cable tossed the credit card on the top of a stack of newspapers. Told the kid to have a good night.  
  
He went back to the hotel he’d been staying in, shoved everything he had into a plastic WalMart bag, and took the phone book from the bedside table. He left the keycard wedged beneath the landline phone, next to a $5 tip and a thank you note to the cleaner.  
  
The weather was getting warmer. Nearly 11 PM, the sky a flat black with no sign of stars, and the day’s heat had yet to break. Cable slept sitting up in the driver’s seat of his stolen truck, the window open but no breeze blowing through. He woke sideways, drenched in sweat, the stick shift stuck under his ribcage.  
  
He called around to a few different scrap yards that morning, from numbers he dug out of the phone book. It took a few hours, but he finally found one outside of Manhattan that would take the truck without a title. He told the stony voice on the other end of the line about the make and model, and then when he was asked if he had anything else to fence, about the guns he’d found in the glove box. The voice offered Cable $650 if he could bring it all in before the end of the day. Cable drove it right over on a quarter tank of gas, the broken air conditioner blowing hot air across his face.  
  
A middle-aged man wearing grease-stained overalls met him at the gate, eight feet tall and built from tires and barbed wire. Didn’t ask for a name. Didn’t offer one. Just looked over the truck, kicked the tires, and tested the firing on both of the guns. Once he got around to counting out the cash, he kept pausing, mid unfold, and taking a long time to lick the tip of his thumb and get back to counting again.  
  
“Nice truck,” he said. His words slurred around a wad of tobacco he was rolling around his mouth with his tongue. “Shame to part it out.”  
  
“Do whatever you want with it."  
  
He squinted at Cable. Dragged his eyes over the T.O., visible through the loops of his scarf and obvious, shining, in the afternoon sun. He hocked and spit. The tobacco landed at Cable’s feet.  
  
“Seems like I see more’a you freaks every day.”  
  
The man held out a fold of bills. Cable had watched him count it. It was only $500. When Cable hesitated, he shook the bills at him, and quirked an eyebrow, his craggy mouth set to a line. I know I’m fucking you, that look said. And what are you gonna do about it?  
  
Cable’s ribs ached. He had a bullet wound that was still healing. There were security cameras mounted on the shop front and the gate.  
  
Nothing.  
  
“It’s only gonna get worse,” Cable said. He took the money. Tucked it into his jacket. “We’ll outnumber you some day.”  
  
“You want the truck nuts?”  
  
“Keep ‘em.”

* * *

He found a cheap motel, a pink-walled building nestled between a truck stop and a diner. It was run by a small-boned young woman with clay colored skin. Walking through the office door, he’d been swamped by her despair, but she still smiled when he asked what he could do to make his money stretch.

  
“I can cut you a deal, since you’re paying cash upfront,” she said. She offered him black coffee in a Styrofoam cup. He sipped it; it tasted burnt, and was hot enough that it scalded his tongue.  
  
“You work here alone?” he asked her.  
  
“No, with my husband,” she answered, but her smile fell. The lines around her almond-brown eyes deepened to cracks.  
  
Aliyah had always chided him - it was rude to peek inside of people, she'd say, even if their thoughts were so loud that they spilled out all on their own. He did it anyway, half out of habit. Half because it was just part of him, as deeply ingrained as anything. Like scenting blood in the air, strong emotion was hard not to follow along to the tangle of its core.  
  
He reached out to meet her, toeing into her seeping thoughts.  
  
_I am alone, I am alone._ Like a plunge beneath a seawater wave, salt sting and all, came the rush. Her husband had been gone for the better part of six months. He called on weekends, but she knew that he was cheating on her, and that he would not be coming back. The motel was in his name, and she had three young children, and her mothers and her sisters were an ocean away from her. She very much wanted Cable to leave, because once he was gone, she would sit in her office chair to weep.  
  
“I appreciate it,” he said, lifting his cup.

He siphoned a little of her pain off into himself. As much as he could handle. He felt dampened by her grief. By her bitterness and envy. By the echo her voice, clear like a bell chime. _I just wanted to live a decent life. Whatever did I do so wrong?_

  
He was surprised at how easily he swallowed it all down. There was a tightening in his neck, and an ache deep in the muscle. He tried not to do this too often. The relief he could give people was like a drug. He would bear the burden of the world’s hurt if he could manage it.  
  
“You come by whenever you like, alright?” she said to him. Sonya. Her name was Sonya. She pressed his room key into his hand. Her eyes and face had softened. Her smile wasn’t forced when she waved him out.  
  
His room had a bed, a television, a chair and table. The shower worked, but the hot water only lasted for a minute before turning cold. He shuddered through a wash, then put himself to bed, naked and wet.  
  
He ditched his phone the next day. It had been stolen, same as the truck. He bought a new $30 trac phone and a pack of underwear at the truck stop, and ate a plate of runny eggs that were on special at the diner.  
  
He spent four days in a kind of haze, moving on automatic. The ozone layer in this century hadn’t thinned to the point of being deadly, yet. He sat in the sun for hours, the heat of it beating down on his neck and his shoulders, his legs dangling over the edge of the motel’s empty pool. Whenever he got bored, he’d navigate to the web browser on his phone and Google whatever came to mind. He read the news. He read Wikipedia. He scrolled through gigabytes’ worth of cat pictures, each one purportedly cuter than the last.  
  
He visited the motel office once a day to say hey to Sonya. The coffee was always terrible. He drank it anyway.  
  
He wasn’t sure what else to do.

* * *

  
On the fifth day, Cable sat in bed, lazily assembling and disassembling his rifle. It was early afternoon, and the sky outside was cloudless, the sun burning a hot, brassy welt across the blue.  
  
His left side was aching, but only in the way it always did. This, the motion of caring for the gun, was like the stretch of a well-worn muscle. A simple, rote task. He closed his eyes and concentrated on feeling it; the click of each part slotting into place, and the snap of the undoing.  
  
Someone knocked on the door. His rifle, in pieces, fell to the carpet, no longer held by the gold thread of Cable’s thoughts. Maybe it was Sonya. The day before, she’d mentioned a job that would pay him cash under the table. But when he reached out to skim her mind, he instead touched a void, oil-slick and dark.  
  
“This is super pathetic,” Wade said, when Cable opened the door. He was dressed in a loose pair of sweatpants and a garish pink t-shirt. His face was uncovered. He had a hand stuck to his hip.  
  
“What are you doing here, Wade?”  
  
Wade ignored him, pushing past Cable’s body.

“Dude. You should have said something,” he said. He eyed the bed, stripped down to just the fitted sheet, and the RTEs stacked on the table. His half-smile slipped into something like disgust. “I bet Colossus would let you stay with him. You could be roommates!”  
  
“I can’t stay at the X-Mansion,” Cable said. He didn’t shut the door. Sunlight poured through the doorway, sharpening and illuminating Wade’s shape.  
  
“Why not? You’re a mutie, they’re all muties. It’s a real pea in a pod kinda situation, don’t you think?”  
  
“I don’t owe you an explanation. I just can’t.”  
  
Wade pouted. “Rude.”  
  
The door creaked. Wade looked at it, and then at Cable. His fingers plucked at a fray in his shirt.  
  
“Neena told me you were here. She didn’t say the situation was this dire, though. I thought you’d at least have a babe over, since you’ve been trying so hard to avoid us.”  
  
He wasn’t avoiding them. They weren’t his people. There was nothing to avoid.  
  
“Just tell me what you want, Wade,” he said, his hand flexing on the doorknob.

Wade’s eyes rolled to the ceiling.  
  
“Soooo. I got a new apartment. Kinda had to, since I lost my old one in a freak gasoline explosion.” He simulated an explosion with his hands, palms facing out. He made a “phwoom” sound. Wiggled his fingertips. “It’s small, ugly, and situated right next to a fairly busy road, so there’s really no reason for you to want to come and stay with me while you get back on your feet, but, uh. You know. You  _could_.”  
  
“What? Come stay with you?”  
  
“If you wanted to.”  
  
“If I wanted to.”  
  
He stared at Wade. At his twitching hands and threadbare t-shirt, and the way his pitted skin looked, in the glow of the sunlight. As he’d spoken, he had turned away, but he was darting looks at Cable’s face out of the corners of his eyes.

Domino had told Wade where to find Cable. Maybe she’d told him to do this, too. Find him and drag him out of the isolation he’d imposed on himself. Maybe Wade felt like he owed him something, after what Cable had done to save his life.  
  
“Well.” Wade said, after a long silence had stretched between them. “Do you?”

He didn’t know the answer.

* * *

  
“If it helps, just think of it as me taking pity on you, since you’re alone and can’t take care of yourself.”  
  
"Why the fuck would that help, idiot?"  
  
"Oh, sorry. I was talking to myself.”  
  
Wade was carrying an orange crate in his arms. In it was an olive-drab t-shirt, two pairs of pants, his daughter’s teddy bear, his bodysuit. A pistol and a dozen plus boxes of ammo. The pack of underwear and the phone book. Cable had kept his rifle strapped to his back.  
  
“It won’t be for long,” Cable grunted. “I’ll figure something out.”  
  
“Better not. I've been waiting for someone to play Mystery Date with. Who could my secret admirer be? Fingers crossed for Tyler.”  
  
Wade hip-checked the door. It swung open easily. The apartment was small, with plaster walls painted eggshell white, but it wasn’t ugly. Just plain. There was barely any counter space in the kitchenette, and you could see out of the bedroom window while standing at the door. A set of wide-planed windows was set into the north wall, facing the street; Wade had breathlessly told him about the burrito place on the corner that could be both seen and smelled from the narrow, iron-wrought fire escape.  
  
But there wasn’t any furniture, and though Wade had told him he’d only just moved in, there were no boxes. “A freak gasoline explosion,” he'd said. Whatever that meant.  
  
Wade walked the short distance from entryway to living room. He dropped the orange crate on the floor next to a television, unplugged and set against the far wall. It was a flat screen. Brand new. The box was sitting next to it, stuffed with plastic and packing foam. It looked like his acquiescence had been expected. Wade had rolled a sleeping bag out on the carpet. He presented it to Cable with a little flourish.  
  
“Yeah, no couch yet, sorry,” he said to Cable, when he saw the look on his face. “But you should be comfy down here, right? I really tried to cover all possible amenities, here. You’ve got a blanket and a dinosaur pillow.” He sniffed. "Shit, wait. Where'd I put your dinosaur pillow?"  
  
"It's fine," Cable said. It was. He would be comfortable anywhere.  
  
“What, no thank you?”  
  
"No.”  
  
"Well, okay, asshole,” Wade said, smiling. “Guess I’ll just have to work for it, then.”  ****  
**  
******

* * *

**now**

Cable pulls the broom from the utility closet in the kitchenette. He sweeps the broken glass into a pile as quickly as he can, away from Wade and his trembling body. He starts running through mental lists. How to identify certain traumas. How to deal with them.  _Take him to a hospital,_ he hears Dom’s voice hiss; or maybe it was Aliyah, the anchor of his reason.  _For what?_ he thinks. Wade heals on his own. Whatever else is wrong, Cable must handle it.

“Come on,” Cable says next to Wade’s ear, low, so Wade doesn’t startle. “We need to get you clean.”

He hoists Wade up into his arms, one arm braced under his back, one beneath his knees. Wade’s not a small man, but Cable’s spent a lifetime hauling bodies. His weight isn’t so much.

Cable carries him into the bathroom. He has to angle them to fit them through the narrow doorway. Wade’s legs sweep everything off of the counter. His and Cable’s toothbrushes, a water cup, a half-empty tube of toothpaste. A hairbrush with a purple handle that belongs to neither of them, the bristles still tangled with brown hair.

Cable sits Wade on the toilet. Starts stripping him down. The suit sticks; Cable had worried it might, the way the fabric is matted. He has to tear it away, and the top layer of Wade’s skin comes with it, peeling up thick like the rind of an orange. It turns his stomach, even as the  yellow-marbled subcutaneous scars over itself, layer by layer, until the raw meat is hidden under newly-grown flesh.

“Jesus Christ,” he says softly, to himself, over and over. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”

By the time he’s done, Wade is naked, his body slick with fresh blood, and the toilet seat is dripping with it, the floor tiles are wet. The bathroom is unventilated. Now, it stinks like a slaughterhouse. Cable swallows a mouthful of spit, and shoves the ruins of Wade’s suit into the corner, jammed behind the bathroom door.

“Are you in there at all?”

He tilts Wade’s head up. Moves two fingers in front of his face, back and forth. Wade can’t, doesn't, follow them. His eyes roll around in his skull like marbles in a cup.

How had he even gotten in here if now he was like this? He’d come through the window. Wade’s apartment was four stories up. He would have to have climbed the fire escape, busted the pane in with his bare hands, and dragged himself through a frame full of jagged glass. Never mind what else he had done, to get back in the first place. Gone for months. Gone.

“You hate it when I see you like this,” Cable goads. He cradles the fragile weight of Wade’s head in his hands. “Surprised you’re not bitching about it. You’re always bitching about something.”

Nothing. Fuck.  _Nothing._

He settles Wade into the bath. Stoppers the drain and fills the tub with hot water. He goes to find a clean washcloth and a towel, and when he comes back, the tub is half full, and the water’s already gone copper-brown. He drains the tub and refills it. It happens again. He gives up and turns on the shower head, angling Wade so that he’s sitting beneath the spray.

Cable scrubs him down with the washcloth and a slab of bar soap, the pressure from the showerhead sluicing grime off of him in sheets. Cable’s sleeping pants end up soaked from the water, and the blood, and the rising, curling steam.

This is the most of Wade that Cable has ever touched. He focuses on the motions of cleaning, and not on the softness of Wade’s skin, nor of the texture of each whorling, shifting mass of weeping lesions and heat-pinked scars. He scrubs until every bit of Wade is clean, and the stink of death eases from him, so that he only smells like soap.

“All clean. You got anything to say to me?” he asks, ringing out water from the wash cloth. He’ll have to toss it. He won’t ever be able to get it clean.

 _Please,_ he thinks. Just, something. Anything. What he would do right now, just to hear Wade’s voice.

Nothing.

“Don’t move,” Cable says, uselessly. He leaves Wade to dry in the bottom of the tub. Goes to dig Wade’s favorite pajamas out of his dresser drawer.

By the time he gets back, Wade’s skin has sealed itself to the porcelain. He has to peel him up, and the vacuum between flesh and tub makes a sucking sound that reverberates off of the shower tile. More lost skin. More blood. Wade’s voice in his head, mocking him.  _I heal, so what does it matter?_

“Shit. I didn’t think - “ he mutters against Wade’s throat, when Wade is in his arms again. “Shit. Shit, shit. What the fuck am I doing?”

He has to stick Wade’s limbs into his pajamas for him. It’s like dressing a corpse. Wade doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t help, either. His breathing hitches a few times, but otherwise, he lets Cable move him as he likes. Once he’s no longer naked, Cable carries him into his bedroom, and tucks him, carefully, into his bed.

“Go to sleep, Wade,” he says. His own body is vibrating. The adrenaline. All his instincts are set to fight.

If Wade wakes up alone, with no context for his surroundings, he might panic. Might hurt himself. Cable considers this for a moment, then goes to drag one of the kitchen chairs to Wade’s bedside. He settles into it. Waits.

Wade stares at the ceiling, unblinking. Every so often, tears leak out from his eyes, and down, down into the bedsheets.

* * *

Cable had always feared that he would be a bad father.

He’d waited a long time before agreeing to marry. Longer than that to have Hope. Aliyah had so wanted a baby, and wheedled, and bargained, and begged. He liked children alright, but he hadn't spent much time with them; when he imagined holding his child, he only felt a deep-seated cold. Aliyah, though. He couldn’t deny her anything. He’d agreed, and thought he would simply learn over time, as he’d learned to love his wife. Hope had been born in the spring, two weeks too soon, blue-eyed and with a head of red hair. Cable had only needed one look at her to realize he’d made a mistake.

He’d felt his heart had been pierced open. Wounded, just by the sight of her. Christ, of course he loved her. What had he ever been afraid of?

But when Hope was barely a year old, and Aliyah away, Hope had woken up red-cheeked and sick with a wretched fever. She’d screamed and screamed, and nothing Cable’d done had soothed her. He’d held her squirming body, bundled up tight in her birthing blanket, her tiny face peering out at him from between the fabric folds. She’d felt so hot. His gut churned with uncertainty and the thick weight of shame, and the fear had come crashing back.

She settled after hours of being held and cooed at, and then only because she had managed to weep herself exhausted and had succumbed, finally, to sleep. Cable had done nothing, save play voyeur to her suffering. He'd never hated himself so much.

He turns this memory over and over, examining it like a prism. It’s almost morning before Wade finally falls asleep. He doesn’t move; he doesn’t make a sound. He lies, death-still, striped by moonlight, and then, after many hours, by the rising, pinking dawn.

Cable hates feeling helpless this way, at the mercy of forces he does not understand.

Some time after sunrise, Cable gets up to piss, and a bolt of pain shoots up his leg. He’s still got glass in his foot. It has pushed deep into the muscle by then. He has to use his boot knife to dig all of it out.

* * *

_“She was dead.”_

_“ - because you’re an asshole!”_

_“I was ready to - I was ready - “_

* * *

Cable must have fallen asleep at some point. He comes to when he hears the sheets of the bed shift, and the springs in the mattress creak. His heart leaps. Wade is up, Wade is moving. Whatever had been wrong, maybe sleep had cured it. He opens his eyes and Wade’s face is there, his teeth bared, spit spooling out of his snarling mouth. Cable tries to ask what the hell is wrong, but he can’t, because Wade’s hands clamp around his neck.

“Stop," Wade cries. "Stop it, stop it -”

Cable reacts on instinct, knocking the stool out from beneath himself. He goes down onto his back, hard, his skull cracking against the floor. Wade follows after him, shrieking, wordless. His limbs are shaking. Cable can feel the trembling muscles beneath his hands while he scrambles, desperately, for parts of Wade to hold onto.

Wade screams, bearing his full weight down on Cable’s neck. Cable’s head blooms with the pain and the building pressure. Black spots edge into his vision. He tries to wrench Wade’s hands away, but he’s holding on so tight, his blunt fingertips dug into Cable’s skin.

Cable gasps around nothing. Hears nothing, save for the thunderous kettledrum of his own heartbeat.

If he can’t get Wade off of him, his heart will go arrhythmic. He will go into cardiac arrest and he will die. He doesn’t have a choice. He doesn’t.

He punches Wade, hard, in the neck, his left hand balled into a fist. Wade's larynx collapses beneath the metal. Wade stares down at him, his yellowed eyes bulging. His grip goes slack. He gasps out a set of distressed, clicking sounds; he's trying to speak, still, even through his ruined throat.

"Wade," Cable wheezes. "What the fuck."

Wade lunges forward, and Cable, unthinking, hits him with a burst of telekinetic force hard enough to knock him to the floor.

Cable drags in a deep breath. Coughs, and turns his head to the side to spit out a mouthful of red saliva. At some point, he’d bitten his cheek. He rubs a hand over his neck, to assess what he can of the damage. Wade had throttled him hard enough that he had pulled apart the T.O. mesh at his clavicle. It writhes, worm-like, as it heals. It hurts when he tries to swallow, and he can feel, with his fingertips, a half dozen crescent-moon shapes cut into the right half of his throat. None of it is permanent. But it is savage. Wade had not been looking to injure him. He had been trying to kill.

He crawls over to Wade, who is crumpled on his side, unconscious. The skin at the crown of his head has cracked open like an egg; that and his throat are healing, though now Wade is lying in a small pool of blood. Even knocked out, his eyes are roving beneath his lashless eyelids. His mouth is moving, but none of the sounds he makes seem much like words.

Cable sits beside him. Pulls Wade's gouged-open head into his lap. 

* * *

  _Hey honey! I’m coming over._

The display on his phone blinks at him, presenting him with the cheerful glow of a yellow envelope. A text from Domino. He reads it. Clutches his phone in his hand until the plastic casing creaks with the pressure.

Cable looks at the blood stains on the carpet, and at the mop leaning against the wall. The bucket of iron-tainted water. At the bedroom door, standing ajar. At Wade’s body, straining against the leather belts that are keeping him strapped to the bedposts. Cable had drawn the blinds after he'd manhandled him back into bed, tied him down. Wade looks waxy and ill in the dull light.

He imagines Domino here, and him standing in the shadow of her body. Her face contorted. Her eyes wide.

 _What happened to him?_   she would ask Cable.

But she would be thinking,  _what did you do to him?_ She would be thinking _, this is your fault._

“Please, please, please,” Wade sobs from the bedroom. “Nessa, please, please help me.”

It takes a moment for Cable’s hands to steady.

 _Don’t bother,_ he types out.  _I’m fine._

_You need to get out of there, dude. Not healthy. Get coffee with me! My treat._

_Tomorrow. 1 o’clock?_

_Sounds good. Let me know if you need anything, okay?_

She sends a smiling emoji, a red die, a heart. He stares at them, a row of distant, graphic sentiment. His thumb hovers over the reply button until the screen flickers and fades to black.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had Mystery Date growing up, but I got it from a garage sale without the instruction booklet so I could never figure out how to play. Wade wants to go out with Tyler because he was modeled by a young Chris Evans. - https://www.cinemablend.com/pop/Check-Out-Chris-Evans-Secret-Early-Career-Board-Game-Model-70832.html

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from Mogwai's "Take Me Somewhere Nice." - https://youtu.be/luM6oeCM7Yw
> 
> Chapter titles are my own rough English translations of the lyrics of "Adieu," a song from the Petit Prince musical. If you know French and/or this song, pls don't drag me too hard. - https://youtu.be/jmy_cSJHRFA


End file.
